West Kaul Avenue

Editor's Note: Last spring, in the space of less than a week, four people were shot to death in and around a small residential neighborhood a few blocks north of W. Silver Spring Drive and just west of N. 60th St.

Curious about what was causing such violence in a part of the city not widely known for it, Journal Sentinel reporter Crocker Stephenson and photographer Gary Porter rented an apartment in the Kaul Ave. neighborhood. Stephenson spent a month getting to know the people there.

This is the second of three stories that together create a portrait of that neighborhood. The names of some of the characters have been changed, at their request, to protect their identities.

In Part I, we met -- posthumously -- Rufus Lamont "Silk" Cassel, a drug dealer who was shot to death in May. He was idolized by neighborhood kids, and his death would haunt the area for the rest of the summer.

We also met Norm Jewell, a maintenance worker who in his spare time is helping the kids who live around Kaul find their way safely to adulthood.

And we met Hassie and Bernie Branson. Desperately poor and living inwretched conditions, they have six children, all younger than 7. They have resolved to move away from Kaul.

Over the course of the summer, the story of how Rufus Lamont "Silk" Cassel was shot evolved into legend around the Kaul Ave. neighborhood.

Some said Silk was unarmed and shot by two men attempting to rob back the money he had won off them playing craps. Others said Silk had been trying to break up a fight between the gamblers. Still others said Silk had stepped in front of a gun and had taken a bullet for a friend.

Police reports, court documents and testimony presented at various hearings tell a different tale:

A dice game had been going on for hours in the 5900 block of N. 63rd. While there had been several participants, the two key players had been Silk's friend, a convicted drug dealer named Lamar "Peanut" Walton, and an 18-year-old people called Dada.

Thousands of dollars had exchanged hands, most of it ending up in Dada's pocket. Dada was up by more than $4,000 when police arrived on the scene and the participants scattered.

It would have been difficult at best -- and dangerous, to say the least -- for Dada to have walked away from the game holding so much of Peanut's money. The arrival of the police must have seemed to Dada yet another stroke of luck.

His luck, however, was about to change.

Dada had been forced to leave his car behind. He returned to retrieve it, accompanied by his younger brother. The boy later told authorities that someone handed him a gun and warned that there could be trouble.

There was. Dada's car was blocked. Peanut and Silk were waiting.

Witnesses told police that while Silk held the brother at gunpoint, Peanut, also armed, forced Dada to the ground. Peanut began rummaging through Dada's pockets. A witness told police that Dada was on his stomach, his hands lifted in the air.

"I'm not going to move," he told Peanut.

Peanut found the money. Anything could have happened next. What police said happened was this: Dada's brother -- not two months past his 16th birthday, a tall, angular kid with a thin wispy mustache, a schoolboy who lived at home with his mother -- pulled out a gun and put an end to his childhood.

He shot Silk through the chest.

Witnesses reported hearing as many as 30 shots, although no one butSilk was injured. Norm Jewell, at home a block and a half away, went to his window. He had mistaken the thump-thump-thump of gunfire for kids banging on his door.

It's 6 p.m. when a handful of people begin to gather in a vacant lot in the 6200 block of W. Kaul Ave. for the monthly Kaul Area Neighborhood Development Organization meeting.

A few feet from the sidewalk, a table has been fashioned out of two sawhorses and a sheet of plywood. Laid out on the table are 10 flats of leggy flowers left over from the city's spring planting. Cannas, marigolds, geraniums, coleus and petunias. They give off a vaguely electric scent in the lingering afternoon heat.

The meeting is called to order by Bob Stein, a landlord who founded the group three years ago in an effort to protect his investments by organizing the neighborhood against drugs and crime, and to put pressure on both the city and unresponsive landlords to clean up troubled properties.

Stein's message is simple.

"You can't be afraid of your tenants. Neighbors can't be afraid of their neighbors," he says. "It's the fear, as opposed to the reality, that kills people, that hurts them."

On hand are representatives from various city agencies, including the police department, Department of Building Inspection, Department of City Development and Ald. Don Richards.

The group discusses various abatement efforts, trouble with tenants and with landlords, services available from city agencies, plans for future meetings. Among the literature distributed are the watch diaries of a private security force hired by KANDO to patrol the neighborhood at night.

One of the diaries, dated May 22 and written with a scrawling hand, reads:

"8:40 (p.m.) I had a guy off of the porch of 6228 (W. Kaul) tell me he's thinking of getting rid of some of the security guards.

"He had a gun in his hand and told me he wasn't going to shoot me but another one of our guards. I told him thank you sir for not shooting me as he left."

"Our neighborhood is becoming a ghetto," one of the KANDO members says. "A baby ghetto."

An unpleasant word, "ghetto," racially tinged and evoking images of entrenched poverty, cultural isolation and urban despair.

For years, we have preferred more neutral-sounding phrases, such as "inner city" and "central city," to refer to areas of severe poverty, usually black poverty. But such conditions are no longer confined to Milwaukee's geographically defined central area.

During the last generation -- and intensifying in recent years -- poor black people in Milwaukee have migrated north and west, some of them settling in the eight-block area sometimes defined as the Kaul Ave. neighborhood.

Poverty is not the norm in this part of the city. Far from it. The median household income in the city north of Silver Spring was 33% above the citywide median in the 1990 census, and only 9% of households were below the poverty line.

In the central city, poverty is well known, even expected. And there are community groups, government programs, church networks, all focused on dealing with the effects -- and sometimes the causes -- of poverty.

But poverty on the northwest side exists in isolation, in scattered pockets rather than broad regions. Here it lies north of the geographic boundaries of virtually every public and private anti-poverty program,beyond the reach of community-based and non-profit organizations, outside the awareness of many concerned citizens.

After the KANDO meeting, Stein distributes the flowers to whoever wants them.

A dozen or so plants go untaken, and Stein gives them to a group of neighborhood kids wanting to plant a small garden in the vacant lot. They attempt to dig holes with kitchen spoons and bare hands, but the soil is so compacted they can hardly scratch its surface.

Norm Jewell, who lives across the street, goes home and finds a post-hole digger. He and the kids, who beg him for a turn with the digger, gouge 12 perfectly circular holes in the hard ground.

The plants are added and their roots covered with the pebbly dirt.

"There," Norm says when they finish. "Now you've got a little garden."

In July, Hassie and Bernie Branson tell their landlord, John Bosanec, that they and their six children will move out of their building in the 6200 block of W. Kaul unless he fixes up their apartment and evicts the people they believe are selling drugs out of the apartment below.

"I ain't going to have my kids sitting around here, soaking this stuff up," Bernie says.

"I can't be living in the same building with no drug dealers. If they is dealing drugs, they got guns. Simple as that. I don't want my children being bystanders when the shooting starts."

Coupled with Bernie's fear for his family's safety is his disgust for the building they live in. Although he has repeatedly begged Bosanec to do something about the roaches, cracked windows, broken doors and leaking ceiling, things have gone from bad to worse.

The electric company has cut off service to the building's common areas, including the basement, which houses a washer and dryer. The Bransons wash their clothes in a portable machine they hook up to their kitchen sink and hang them on the balcony to dry.

The neighbor across the hall, deciding to make cookies one night, took two peanut butter jars down from her cabinets, only to find the lids had been chewed off by mice and their contents devoured.

Three-month-old Benji is still not gaining weight. A nurse visits him periodically, recommending changes in his diet. With the stove not working, Hassie has to use her neighbors' apartment's stove to warm his formula.

Benji smiles almost constantly, but his face seems withered. Asleep in his little white wicker crib, his hands pulled to his chest, he looks like a tiny old man laid out in a casket.

When Bosanec stops by to collect the month's rent, he drops off an unlabeled can of paint -- white, judging from a nail hole in the lid -- and a 17.5 ounce can of Raid Ant & Roach Killer, Country Fresh Scent.

Too little, too late. The Bransons refuse to pay him.

"I told him, 'John, I can't give you no money for a place that's not decent to live,' " Bernie says.

Residents in two of the other three units in the building join the Bransons in their rent boycott. Only the reputed drug dealers pay their rent on time.

For the Bransons, moving out will be tough.

There is little chance that they will get their security deposit back from Bosanec, and a new place will require both a security deposit and the first month's rent in advance.

School will start in August, and three of the Bransons' children will need clothes and supplies.

Most of their furniture, and some of their stored clothing, is so bug-infested that it will have to be thrown away.

Their largest source of income is Hassie, who receives $766 a month from Aid to Families with Dependent Children and $350 in food stamps.

Bernie, who was dropped down a flight of stairs when he was an infant, receives $470 a month in Social Security disability benefits. Bernie has had repeated back surgeries that have left him with a track of scars that extends from his buttocks to his neck.

"We'll figure it out somehow," Hassie says. "We sure can't stay here."

It is July 25th, and the 16-year-old boy who shot Silk, having pleaded guilty to one count of possession of a dangerous weapon by a child, appears for sentencing before Children's Court Judge Ronald S. Goldberger.

The boy tells the judge, "I apologize for what happened, and I'm kind of nervous right now. I can promise you that it will never happen again."

The boy's father, when asked if he had anything to add, says, "No. That's OK. All I can say is, this is tough on me."

The boy's mother tells the judge that her son "is a very big support. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The judge sentences the boy to serve one year of probation and to perform 100 hours of community service.

Hassie's pal, Pinky, is over for a visit when the phone rings. It's the owner of an apartment building some 30 blocks to the east. She tells Hassie she will have a two-bedroom unit for $425 a month available near the beginning of August. She wants a security deposit but appears willing to let the Bransons move in for $700.

"Yes, yes, that'll be fine," Hassie tells the woman. "That'll be just fine."

She hangs up the phone and lets out a whoop.

"It's larger and it's better," she tells Pinky. "You walk down a big white hallway to your door. And it's clean. And bigger. Much bigger than this old place."

"This place is a slum you're living in now," Pinky tells her.

"That's right. It is. This (new) place has no roaches. I didn't see no roaches all the time I was there."

Hassie lifts Benji from his crib and holds him so that his feet just touch the top of the kitchen table. She sways him back and forth, so that it appears he's doing a little dance.

"Hear what I'm saying, Benji? We are moving to someplace else."

On the same day Dada's brother is sentenced in Children's Court, narcotics officers search an apartment in the building next door to the Bransons.

They seize one $50 bill, 33 $20 bills, 27 tens, 80 fives and 31 ones from the pockets of two residents. From the apartment itself, they remove, among other things, six crack pipes, a shoulder holster, 15 unfired shotgun shells, two scanners, a pager, boxes of sandwich bags, a test tube, a mirror and razor blade.

August 1st. Moving day for Hassie and Bernie Branson.

Hassie's sister and Bernie's cousin are over first thing in the morning to help them pack. Clothes, pots and pans, toys and keepsakes are placed in plastic bags. Bernie drains the water bed, takes the frame apart. The kids' bunk beds are dismantled. What is broken or infested is thrown out or given away.

By midafternoon, the apartment is in chaos. Everything is ready to go. But something is changed.

A few days before, Hassie and Bernie were beside themselves with optimism and hope. Now, Hassie sits at the kitchen table and opens a beer. She yells at her children for the slightest infractions. Bernie says almost nothing, then goes outside and works on his car, a 1981 Pontiac he bought from an uncle for $25.

"I don't know what's going to happen," Bernie says vaguely.

Night comes and passes. In the morning, the Bransons are still there.